Company lag on women executives

Women are outnumbered almost four to one by men in senior positions at the biggest companies, disclosures under new Australian Securities Exchange guidelines show.

A review by The Australian Financial Review of 50 company reports shows women occupy 21 per cent of senior management positions at companies that have made the disclosures.

The company reporting the smallest proportion of women at senior management level is Sims Metal Management with 6 per cent, followed by Toll Holdings with 8 per cent.

Toll human resources director Lesley Staples said the group’s broader team of managers were 38 per cent female. “Of course there’s more to be done but we are committed to meeting the challenge," she said.

Eleven chief executives gathered in Sydney yesterday to pledge to do more to get women into senior corporate jobs. Rio Tinto managing director
David Peever
told the forum his industry would have to draw on women to fill the 86,000 jobs it would create in Australia this decade.

“There’s a very, very strong business imperative for us . . . it’s down to the leadership and dealing with the hidden bias we’ve all had before," Mr Peever said.

The Financial Review found the biggest cohort of female managers was at Sonic Healthcare and Macarthur Coal, each with 44 per cent. While Sonic Healthcare’s employees are 77 per cent female, Macarthur Coal’s are 21 per cent female and Macarthur stands out for having a higher proportion of women in management than in the company overall. Macarthur chief executive
Nicole Hollows
said flexible work practices made the difference. “It’s not by design . . . we promote the best people," she said.

Corporate performance prompted a rebuke from the federal government. “Good intentions will no longer be enough – we want good outcomes," Minister for the Status of Women,
Kate Ellis
, said yesterday. “I am not taking the option of quotas off the table."

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ASX corporate governance council guidelines were updated last year to include tougher diversity requirements. The rules, which require measurable objectives and the proportion of women in senior ranks to be published, will not start to bite until next year but many companies have already reported.

But the guidelines themselves have been criticised. Their request for “measurable objectives" left companies wriggle room, said sex discrimination commissioner
Elizabeth Broderick
.

“They use the terminology of measurable objectives and it’s for organisations to interpret what that means, but we are trying to build a mass of women at senior leadership levels and that requires a target – a hard-and-fast target against which you can measure progress," Ms Broderick said.

AGL Energy has developed its measurable objectives around “establishing the foundations" for gender equity. It will focus on training and creating succession plans.

The company’s group head of people and culture, Jane Thomas, said the company set objectives that reflected the stage it was at. “We believe in getting the foundations right to enable us to achieve those future objectives that we will set, most probably," she said.

Chairwoman of women’s leadership lobby group, The 100 Per Cent Project, Frances Feenstra said the definition of executives was not strict enough, allowing companies to boost apparent female representation at the top.

“I’m not saying they are fudging the numbers, I am saying if the guidelines are slightly ambiguous you can pull some positions into those numbers that you may not otherwise have in there," Ms Feenstra said.

Yesterday Westpac chief executive
Gail Kelly
said she had set an “aspirational" target of having half of the bank’s management positions filled by women. Westpac’s official policy is to achieve 40 per cent female senior management ranks by 2014. “Why shouldn’t it be 50 per cent?" Mrs Kelly said. “I mean, that’s what we should be aiming at. That’s got to be our ultimate aspirational target."

Research suggests that companies benefit from diversity. Return on equity is 9.2 per cent over five years for the 47 per cent of ASX 500 companies with female directors, and 0.5 per cent for those without female directors, according to research from the Reibey Institute.

The proportion of ASX 500 companies without female directors has fallen from almost two-thirds in 2010 to 53 per cent this year. Two companies in the ASX 50 have gone so far as to publish the ratio of male to female pay in their annual reports.

At Brambles, men in senior management earn 16 per cent more than women; across the organisation, men earn 9 per cent more than women.

At BHP Billiton, where women make up 10 per cent of senior managers, pay levels of female and male senior managers is the same. Remuneration “is not tainted by structural bias on the basis of gender," the company reports.

One explanation for the shortage of women is unconscious bias. Decision-makers may not consciously discriminate against women but hold biases they cannot detect, according to academic research.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive
Ralph Norris
said men may initially reject the theory. “To say you have unconscious bias is something not many men are prepared to accept but after attending workshops they accept that yes, they do have unconscious bias and they are part of the issue," he said.

Woolworths’ new chief executive Grant O’Brien said the best teams he’d worked in had both genders. “For this change to occur, it’s going to require both men and women working together," Mr O’Brien said.

IBM Australia and New Zealand managing director Andrew Stevens said if his company hired 60 per cent women, it would take five years to move the gender balance 2 percentage points. “It’s not easy. You have to start yesterday," he said.